The Black Friday Mac Bundle 2.0 is one of the Boing Boing Store’s best-selling Mac bundles yet, and it’s about to come to an end. If you don’t get your copy now, here’s what you’ll be missing:This bundle comes packing 9 top-rated Mac apps in one package, at the hugely discounted price of just $23.99. […]

The Boing Boing Store’s Gift Guide is full of ideas for pretty much anyone in your life like hipster ice cub trays, Xbox controllers, Halo Boards, and even diamond necklaces. As always, all products in the Boing Boing Store come at great discounts, too. Shop by price bucket starting at under $20. Under $20:Bloxx Jumbo Ice Trays […]

Unlike traditional lighters, the SaberLight features an electronic plasma beam that’s both rechargeable and butane-free. This sleek lighter is even approved by TSA, so you’ll never be stuck buying lighters you’ll just have to throw away partially used. For some people, like me, this is a pretty big game-changer. The SaberLight’s beam is actually both hotter and cleaner […]

I find it interesting that the media focused on the ‘victims’ part of the speech, but somehow didn’t mention his more bizarre belief (one shared by many on the top) that poor people believe they are “entitled” to food, education, and health.

I find it telling really, the state of mind some people have when they add food and other such benefits of modern civilization, and call them “entitlements”. I’ve seen this word used a lot over the past few years, always on the pro-corporate side of the debate. While they fail to use the same word do describe themselves in the process. Apparently entitlement only goes one way.

My not-too-remote ancestors lived in a society where everyone was entitled to eat. Of course, if they were able-bodied, they were also entitled to work. It was a mostly primitive agricultural society and primitive agriculture is an infinite labor sink, so there was always work to do. A few centuries later, after the industrial and cybernetic revolutions, apparently there isn’t work even for a lot of able-bodied, able-minded people, to say nothing of the halt, the lame, the blind, the mad, the too young and the too old (about half the population). But there’s plenty of food — about half of it is thrown away, in fact. So what do we do? Let ’em starve?

Unfortunately, this is the direction they seem willing to go. Recall the screams of “let him die” from the Republican debates regarding uninsured medical patients. There seems to be a continual doubling down on this social darwinian (who would have guessed the supposedly “Christian” party would be the most darwinian?) concept of individualism that involves letting people die if they can’t make it in society without help, unless of course they’re wealthy people with voodoo job creating superpowers (that they’re apparently willfully not using while blaming Obama for killing jobs, if they actually were job creators…). Then their corporations need all the captured regulatory policies and tax subsidies their lawyers, lobbyists, and tax attorneys can finagle.

The conservative version of “teach a man to fish…” seems to be “if you give a man a fish when he’s incapable of fishing for himself, he’ll always expect fish from you, so let him die, and that way he’ll never ask for fish from you again. You might have been on a fish-stamps program when you were needy, but it’s not like anyone ever helped you when you were pulling yourself up by your fishing bootstraps…”